Week 7

Finalising my designs, this week I have been designing, looking into menswear in the 1940s, focusing on business wear, all the way to suits that my brothers have wore, I have been looking at photographs and different styles throughout the years, like menswear has evolved, so has my family, I want to represent the journey my family has been on and how it has evolved. I wanted to incorporate styles that my family in the 1940s wore aswell as suits my brothers, uncle and cousins have worn. To me, its like representing all the men in my family, so from the 1940s I took the more lounge side to the suit, designing slightly loose fitted trousers with rolled up bottoms and a more business suit jacket, with the standard lapels and front pockets. I will add a dart in the front of the jacket to make it slightly fitted. I have also been doing stand work with fabric samples I got from rolls and rems to see what type of lapel I want on my suit and how I want it to contour the body.

Throughout this project I have throughly enjoyed using photoshop and creating prints using different techniques, repeat patterns and defining the pattern. I have been taking my favourite parts of my research and responses and developing them into prints to represent the traits within my family, I took a liking to my face features illustrations and decided to develop this, putting them into photoshop by abode scan and playing around with different techniques including mirroring, layering, the lighting and scale, but after a long thought I realised if I choose this print, it wouldn’t make complete sense to my research as this idea came later and hasn’t been developed its just illustrations I liked. So to avoid misunderstanding of my project I went back into my research and looked at my collaging, which was a big part of this project as it was a great way to compare and visually see similarities we share, I decided to combine parts of prints I have previously made, to develop them into one, following my green toned colour palette. It was hard for my to decide what print to finalise, so to help me decide I drew my final design on tracing paper and placed the prints behind them to see what it may look like. I had a lightly green toned background with my print that I worked hard to hide the repeat as make it look all one. Just like my family, we are all connected by the same genes and we share DNA. I created my final design on photoshop with my print edited into the garment to see what it would look like.

With my design in mind, I went fabric shopping in lewisham and looked at suit material, debating and deciding on what type I wanted, I chose a heavy, all black, lovely suit fabric and a light weight, 100% polyester material for the lining, which I printed on with the heat roller. This took a process of printing my pattern onto 5 metres of transfer paper, I laid this onto a flat surface, then laid out the fabric on top, which I had to iron first to get rid of the strong crease where it had been folded to avoid any mistake when printing, then placed tissue paper ontop and pinned it in place to avoid the heat roller burning my fabric. Due to my fabric being thin and may have been a mix, we had to slightly speed up the speed it goes through the roller so that it didn’t burn it.

Toile:

I cut out a standard suit block pattern for my suit, and looked at youtube videos on the basics of making a suit, I also used wikihow to get myself familiar with the basics of my making a suit, i decided to make a toile of the suit out of calico, to reduce material wastage and mistakes. So I cut all the pieces out in calico and marked the darts and notches, when all pieces were cut, I sewed the front panels to the side panels, then these to the back panels. I then sewed the under sleeves and top sleeves together and then slowly sewed this, slightly gathering, easing the sleeves into the arm holes. When the toile was finished I was pleased with the overall look, the darts in the front gave it a slight fit which I was happy with. However the overlook look for me was a little too plain, so I noted what I wanted to change, which was to add pockets on the front panels, I also found the lapels too triangular and came too far out into the garment, almost touching the sleeves which gave it a look I wasn’t going for.  The toile I made also didn’t have a collar, which I found would look unusual and not the way I wanted. Therefore I had a list of things to change when it came to making it with my materials, which made the toile beneficial to make due to me wanting to change and adjust the suit to fit my project designing.